Re: usrmerge -- plan B?

Michael Stone <mstone@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 08:54:43AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
>> If I was wrong in assuming good faith and you were being argumentative
>> for the sake of being argumentative, please stop: that is not
>> constructive.
>>
>> Either way, please don't call me stupid. That is not *at all*
>> constructive - especially if you want things you say in future to
>> change my opinion on anything! - and contributes to an atmosphere of
>> hostility that drives away Debian contributors.
> I agree. I wish you were just as busy policing memes like "people who
> have issues with mandatory usrmerge are just scared of change".
There is not enough energy in the world to police all of the unnecessarily
confrontational and counter-productive things people have said in this
thread. :(
I wholeheartedly agree: the argument here is not about fear of change.
It's primarily about a cost/benefit tradeoff and an orderly transition
that is well-understand and won't surprise anyone, and secondarily about
Debian's ongoing severe social problems around having a constructive
technical discussion.
Thank you so much, Simon, for your incredibly useful and productive
messages in this thread.
I am certain there are technical approaches and good compromises here that
will make everyone happy, but we're not going to be able to reach them if
everyone falls into the trap of loudly repeating their position, getting
defensive, and lashing out at each other.
We had some things break because of a change to buildd configuration that
caught some people by surprise. It's entirely reasonable that the first
reaction to that was "woah, wait, hold on, slow down, what's going on
here?" A wonderfully productive next step would be for someone with the
time to do so (which sadly I do not right now) to write up a summary of
what the desired end state should be for Debian (maybe with a few options)
and then a more detailed transition plan about how to get from where we
are now to where we want to be. That will give us something concrete to
debate and to test against the risks that people perceive, and hopefully
will reduce the hardening of positions on all sides.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxx) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>